The PAINting Tier List - Ranking Every 40K Faction by Painting Difficulty 

The Q&A Community post can be found here: ru-vid.comUgkxA32PzAockYEu07GOEz3RVLcqo8Mdj5fD

Listening to this while painting Cadians. The new models have an insane amount of detail and 20 minis are just 130 points. The brush broke before the guard did.

You could say Harlequins are actually the most painless faction to paint, because the only people who would even try are already psychotic. Can't lose your mind if you're already crazy.

I love how the description of the team's admech player is so lore-accurate. He performs the most mind-numbing of repetitive tasks with ease, astonishing his human companions while only being annoyed at his own minor imperfections.

As a Grey Knights player, hearing "hello no, they are 90% covered in chachkies" warms my heart.

I’m 120 models into my imperial guard army and have never been so tired of painting

"You paint one heldrake and you're changed for life." Truer words are never spoken. When I painted mine, I didnt paint again for 4 months.

A lot of armies can answer the question if "Are they difficult to paint" by using the same answer as "Have they had a large range refresh since 2016?"

I started painting Slaanesh demons and I was okay with how they came out. But I thought they could be better. I repainted them and they were great, but I started seeing how I could do better. Soon the warm rays of the sun meant nothing to me. My eyes burn in phantasmsgoric images. It is never enough.

Remember, orks don't paint straight lines or within the lines. I painted them "perfect" but they took too long and looked "wrong." I started painting them sloppy and dirty and they look much better and are my favorite army to paint now.

In a lot of Thousand Sons lore in Tzeench’s Palace of Fun and Torture™️ theres a lot said about how “time can move like second and feel like years,” so I’m pretty sure he just forces you to paint ONE rubic marine.

As a Tau player without an airbrush, I can tell you choosing your paints is really important. Vallejo or AK interactive make for brush stroke-free results far easier than GW base paints. I also play Guard, and have about 120 Cadians. I had a bunch of Mormon missionaries paint some of them for me! They'd come around to preach, but kept seeing the sea of grey on a side table. They volunteered to help paint them, because they missed painting mini's back in the UK. I didn't convert, but I did appreciate their efforts.

My first and current main army were the Ad Mech, they were a ball ache at first, but they basically made anything else a breeze to put together and paint, so i definitely learned a lot from diving in to the hardest army, i loved their lore and how they look so I went with them and never looked back. Long live the adeptus mechanicus *insert inaudible human speech here*

The one thing about death guard that makes it harder to paint is also why they are enjoyable to paint. With every model for the most part having a unique sculpt it doesnt become tedious painting.

There was a reason I picked necrons... It wasnt because of how easy they were to paint, but once I realized that fact, I am forever grateful I did pick them

For space marines it’s also highly dependent on the chapter. As an imperial fist shill, I have been suffering with yellow for many weeks now lol

I love the fact that each death guard model is unique

I miss the old tan box colours for T’au. XV-88 is an under-appreciated paint.

Necrons are the easiest to get "good" but I find they're WAY hard to get to a really high level because they're so simple and really showing off is hard

I play Thousand Sons and my trick for the trim is to just use metallic gold primer then fill in the flats of the armor with blue. You still need a few other colors for details, but that's 90% of the model.

I remember back in like 2012 at Adepticon there was a guy playing Drukari. Due to how many people are there the players are really cramped togather. While he was trying to move his army from one match to the next one, someone bumped him and he dropped it which resulted in at least a third of his army breaking into pieces. Sadly he had to forfeit the last 2 rounds because there was no way to repair his army that day.

I actually got into death guard after your last paint video. The more i painted DG the more i realized you guys were dead wrong, the correction you made cause your DG told you its problems was a satisfying "now we agree" - feeling.

Unpainted grey tide? No sir, you see, this my custom Blood Axes Clan where the Orks have completely mastered stealth and it's represented this plain grey color all over the place...

Firstly, love the video, it was intro for some such as me who just started my collection and finished painting my necrons. You see, as a “paint licker” I didn’t look up painting videos and found out what dry brushing is AFTER all of my painting so, yes. It is difficult to paint necrons if you are a 40 IQ barbarian such as myself. Next Army, grey knights. Pray for my success…

Oh boy, the comment about Necrons limbs reminded me of how my Trazyn model lost his legs at least 3 times so far. The 1st time was just picking up the miniature after applying the initial base coat. The base stuck a bit too hard to the cardboard and the legs snapped right off.

I’m still learning to paint, not on warhammer models mind, and I haven’t gotten far yet but it’s given me a lot of respect for anyone who can produce a fully painted army.

Not only do sisters have a lot of infantry, but there are tons and tons of capes and cloaks. Depending on your style it can be a huge time sink

the key to CSM, at least black legion, is dry brushing all the trim first, then filling back in the panels...black templar contrast works well for this. after these two steps there's not to much else.

With the addition of Leviathan, i now have over 120 termagants, and i really do need to reconsider the original plan of batch painting ALL of them in one giant batch. Doing 20 at a time and enjoying a carnifex or hive tyrant palatte cleanser seems like a much healthier plan. After that, I'll be at a fork in the road: do I choose the 4 boxes of Gargoyles, or the 4 boxes of Hormagaunts that I've had in the bin since 5th edition? There's always the upcoming refreshed Termagant kit with new weapon options, maybe a nice even 200 gants is the right number to land on. See you all in 18th edition!

Brad should buy a box of death rattle skeletons for AOS and re-evaluate what spindly bits is

Drukhari in Painless tier is mad! There kinda needs a tier of "you can get away with contrast and ignoring bits" for Drukhari, Deathguard, Orkz, Tyranids and Chaos Daemons IMO.

Necrons are a treat until the first time you pick up a fucking flayed one and it explodes.

Hello! Dedicated Thousand Sons player here, have about 4k points painted and they were my first well painted army. Helpful tip for painting TS - prime them in GOLD, and only GOLD. If you do anything else, you will hate yourself. Then just fill in the blue parts & wash / highlight. I also recommend using contrast paint for Tzaangors.

I started painting CSM as my first army they looked terrible but by the end i could do trim pretty well

The space marine characters mustache vs intercessor comment is 1000% accurate

I'm getting into Warhammer from your podcast, and this episode was the first time that I actually shed a tear. Hearing you two talk about painting and learning with the hobby reminded me of the true, deep feeling of playful satisfaction that comes from calmly engaging with your passion project. Thank you.

Man this was absolutely brilliant. friends having fun laughing and joking around about something they clearly love…. Count me in!

Finishing a thousand sons army is more of a rite of passage than an actual enjoyable task

So true the comment about "if your current army version is good enough, don't redo it". I love the new cadian models but my 120+ OG cadians are good enough! Thanks for sharing!

Necrons are so easy to paint, I find myself trying to think of steps to add to my paint recipe for Necrons, rather than remove like other armies.

I do like the Ad Mech A LOT lore wise and I wanted to play as them as my first army but thanks for the heads up on the painting, they never seemed easy to paint and now I have proof

I decided on Sisters for my "Real deal" army. different colour inner and outer robes, metallic green armour, full leather and marble details, really ornate bases, the works. Consequently so far I've painted a Canoness and nearly finished three headless battle sisters, and picked up about 1500pts of Necrons to have an army I can actuall play with who're getting a metal spray, a metal drybrush, a dip wash, their torsos and guns gone over with a contrast, and then an aquarium-plants-and-mud-texture-special base. Not because I specifically wanted jungle world necrons but because I have the basing materials left over from Seraphon. Speaking of Seraphon, they're like fantasy Tyranids except they hold weapons that you can, thankfully, get away with blocking in gold and then going over with black contrast and Agrax Earthshade. The really big monsters can be totally different colours to your main army theme for a nice pallette cleanser like Chaos Daemons, there's a bit of simple grey or sandstone palanquins in there for some flat panel stuff, a bit of wooden beams or cloth, they're a great army. I turned my first Bastiladon into a Venusaur and it sitting in the shop window for a couple of months geniunely brought people into the store; my second will be Blastoise and a friend is making theirs into Torterra. But back to first point, Sisters have one massive problem: shgoulder pad gaps. Every. Single. One of them. Has a huge seam directly down the middle of both shoulder pads. If you're going to collect this army you NEED to know how to gap fill. And yes, faces can be an issue especially because you're The Pretty Girls army; thankfully every Sisters kit has a full complement of helmets and a lot of them can get away with a one-coat contrast face and then a lot of details put into their hair instead. I'll be doing faces in batches of fives or tens after I'm done getting bodies fieldable, but I'm aiming for about 2/3rds helmetted which can just be done at the same time as the armour.

Strange comment perhaps but I really enjoy the format of your channel. You have great chemistry and the editing is on point and not too much or too little.

I do a "trim first, then the color" scheme on most Chaos Marines, and it honestly makes them quite fast and enjoyable to paint. What I do is base coat the model in the trim color, wash it, dry brush it - all the things you need to make the trim look good. Then I fill in the panels. This is usually a lot faster if you have a paint which covers well, but is still of a good consistency. Painted a LOT of Black Legion marines that way.

I would love an episode on kitbashing/conversions. Maybe talk about some that you two or your playgroup has done, some more common conversions that just so happen to show up. Or, even how to to screw forgeworld and convert a plastic kit into a forgeworld model. Like buying a box of Canoptek Wraiths and building them into a Tombstalker, Tombsentinel or some Acanthrites.

Lots of Custodes detail is in their armor plates and can work with just wash over gold to make it look good.

24:37 pro tips for painting Heldrakes: 1) get an airbrush and do a reverse wash, ie gold lacquer then black enamel and wipe away the black on the trim or 2) get yourself a hobby metallic marker in the colour of your choice for the trim

I have a great enjoyment listening to yall! I am currently making a Death Korps of Krieg cosplay and have listening to you makes it even more enjoyable. Also, i appreciate the advices on these videos

Honestly gotta say that your channel is one of the best Warhammer channels on RU-vid bar none. You two actually talk about stuff that the average painter/player cares about. Keep up the great work!

After painting almost 3000 pts of black Templars infantry I will say a couple of things. Edge highlights start feeling good after your 15th marine (be sure to have an audiobook while doing it). Tabards are cool and chains are the bane of my existence.

With Heldrakes I highly recommend Paint Pens. I got my trim 90% done in like 15 minutes it was awesome.

Genestealers look really hard, but they also have some pretty hard drip. Pro painted GSC is some of the coolest looking minis I’ve ever seen.

I'm painting a CSM army right know and I actually enjoy it. The trick is to fill in the panels instead of doing the trim. I play black legion, so black primer, bronze drybrush to catch the trim and filling in the panels with contrast paint works just fine. Painting the trim on normally seems like madness to me haha

I remember being a wee lad looking for my first army. I liked the nurgly tanks of Death Guard. I was scared of painting. I listened to a podcast from my trusted content creators, which said Nurgle was easy to paint. Confident, I bought about 1500 pts of Death Guard. It's the easy to paint faction, how bad could it be? I started to paint. Holy shit, painting is hard! And this is the easy one! It has tons of bits and bobs. Every time I look at a plague marine I see I new maggot. How do I paint the horns? Is that a skull growing out of a knee? Why does everything drip slime? And this puke green base color is so bland when I do it, how do I make it less flat? Volumetric highlight and recess shading? Oh god! I'm spending one and a half hours for every plague marine, this will never end! Cut to me yesterday, painting my space marines and listening to this. Yes, brad, not shit your DG player had words with you. I painted my first 500 pts of space marines in less time than it took to paint my first 30 poxwalkers, and they look better.

I have so many gripes with this list, but thanks for another fun episode!

as a newbie wanting to start the hobby this episode is really helpful, keep the good work guys

I'm proud of what I painted, but I really wish someone told me that white paint was a nightmare to deal with. Painting Tau in their white, black, and red colour scheme has been an experience. (I'm very glad I had an airbrush for that...)

Hell yeah, love that the underrated podcast is becoming less underrated.

“Chaos Trim Zone” sounds like a place I visited a few too many times as a younger man. Sometimes you learn your lessons the hard way.

i fricking love my Necron! Never had such a breeze nocking out minis while having them look amazing.

Honestly when i first started painting admech i was a little intimidated, but after awhile its actually way easier then it looks, because leadbelcher and nuln oil makes everything look good

I’m actively painting my gsc neophytes as Im watching this, and I couldn’t agree more. Painting neophyte hybrids is so incredibly draining

I agree! I just finished some Stormcast in silver armour and YES I can't believe how easy and fast it was. I finally get what they say about painting Necrons. I've painted many Death Guard minis in the past and while fun it took forever and also was it took me several iterations to find a formula I liked for horns, tentacles, worms, guts... I've also painted CSM, Thousand Sons, a few marines, an eldar vehicle, lizardmen...so yeah.

I started painting deathguard thinking "oh if they are sloppy it's fine" but I had to quickly learn how contrasts work to make the individual unique bits look good. I then moved on to Votann and half way through the army I started doing a zenithial drybrush and contrasts. Sooooo much more fun and so much better looking too!

I really should make a video on this one day but I have found there is actually a very painless way of doing checkerboards or decals on models and it involves practically no paint. First paint the area your base color, white( or grey if you value your soul). Then grab a piece of paper a little bigger than the size of the area you want your decals/checkers and draw 'em out or print them, whatever is easier. Smother the entire image you want to show with pencil lead, flip it over and RUB ONE OUT on your model. Then you clear coat when you got enough on there and your done. My old Imperial fists logo was done this way and I didn't need any paint at all to get it looking dope af. Checkers would be even easier than that monstrosity was.

Oh the Admech, i feel that one. Add on magnetizing. i magnetized the bigger antennas to add a nice shear point because i knew they'd break off. I've been painting orks as a palette cleanser between painting neon daemons.

The only army I have is Tyranids, but I fully agree with your placement. Little horde gribblies are fast to paint, big models are fun and rewarding, plenty of elite infantry models that are in-between, and while you CAN go super basic and easy, you definitely have room to add extra complexity and challenges if you wish. Very glad with my choice!

Just noticed the bottom right and left man glow when you're each talking. Thats some editing

The one struggle of painting Eldar is if you're doing lore friendly aspect warriors, it means doing eight color schemes that are only on a single unit each and are completely unique from every other unit and each other. Still haven't been able to bring myself to paint those six shining spears haha

I've just finished a helldrake this month. You are right i am changed for life. Had to stop painting my khorne berserkers part way through after that I just don't have it in me to do any more trim for a bit. I've gone back to painting Tyranids which honestly just feels like coming home now. Such a joy to paint

Death Guard have been my most favorite army to paint so far with slap chopping. Yes, each sculpt is very individual but they share a lot of the same types of details. Just have a plan for each detail and it's a great time painting after the armor and trim is all batched painted

Yeah honestly I think tsons are not even at gunpoint. It took me 2 hours + for a rubric marine lmao

"paint a heldrake and you're changed for life" Listen, I didn't click on this video just to be called out like that. The heldrake is the FINAL MODEL I have to paint for my Black Legion army, I just don't know if I have it in me after painting ten warp talons over the course of a day. CSM trim hell is where I belong for now.

Your guys’ commentary is gold

I found this video just as I have started to paint my new admech army. I may yet regret my decision, but I'll get back to you as and when I go insane.

I paint primarily AdMech and I find them to be okay. I hand paint the trims on the coats and it is the hardest part, and the spindly bits are definitely annoying, but I find the paint job fairly easy and fun. They’re similar to Necrons sometime in the sense that for Skitarii all you need to do is paint the metal and wash it, and then it’s just highlights on the coats and pants

I'm painting Sisters in their sacred rose scheme. The chaos trim zone is an understatement to me

It was such a good idea to start this hobby with kill team. I got to learn how to paint so many different armies but always in a small dosis. When painting the Harlequins I just painted them black and white for the clothes and a strong contrast paint in red, blue and yellow for the hair and I think they look really nice this way. Knowing how to "cheat" right can lead to very good results and an intact psyche ;-) The last kill team was GSC and I bet it was way easier to do them last with all the experience collected along the way. Overall I agree with your tier list very much. Very nice episode.

I have not laughed so much in ages! Thanks

As someone who is new to 40K but had painting experience from AOS, doing my Tyranids has been pretty painless. I’m definitely going too hard because my brushes suck and I make a lot of mistakes and I’ve still cranked through like 600pts without getting bored

Can you guys do a video on how to make the crappier detachments for every faction actually competitively playable?

Loved this, I'm very new to the hobby. Struggle a lot with getting my ass in the seat and painting but also with feeling good about the small improvements and learning. This is a nice guide for those of us who aren't sure about the models and which are easy and which aren't so we don't feel more de-motivated afterwards. I do wonder, would you be down for doing this but for AoS? Would love to know your thoughts on stuff like Orcs (IronJawz) :) Earned my sub either way, had a great time listening to this :)

This episode motivated me to start working on my neceon pile of shame. And man, those are fun to paint, the only part approaching difficult is if you fully assemble the models and have to paint some bits that are blocked/obscured.

I tried painting a small squad of Genestealer Cultists and oh boy, it was brutal. I had previously painted some wyches and scourges, and even with the trouble keeping their wings on, I would still rather paint each of those every day for a year than paint GSC once again.

My blood angels are all ork kitbashes. They are genuinely painless to paint because they are so much fun

This was a great episode

This video deserves more views and your channel more subs!!

My first army is Tau and I wanted them to be white... after 2 drones I bought an airbrush. This tierlist is very validating lmao

I love how all of my armies are at the bottom of the list. I think that I may be more of a masochist than Brad

Man, I remember when I played back in 4th... 5th edition? I started with Orks because the GW store didn't have any Necrons in stock. (Back then Necrons had a nasty case of "Almost as forgotten as Squats"-itis.) and everything you said about Genestealer cultists, applied to them. Here's 90 boyz, there's 8 sculpts and every one is wearing a shirt, pants, 3 kinds of armour, 11 belts, and accessories. Every time you drop a new episode and I think of when I can get back into the hobby, I default to Orks and remember the hell of painting htem compared to everyone that would come later. (Plague marines, necrons, black templars, literally every Malifaux crew that had been released into 2013.) I also remember an even more hilarious version of the lyche guard problem from the first iterations of Malifaux. They were all pewter back then, and some genius decided to have all the rotten belles holding open parasols... Which were too heavy for the handles of said parasols. So everyone was running around with these bent-drooping models that were too heavy to support their own weight.

As someone who has played Thousand Sons since 4th edition, I've found that metallic sharpies are the perfect way to do Chaos trim. Just do a wash over the sharpie marks.

I think the thing with the Guard is that they're hard to do well, sure, but they're really easy to do passably. Just base them in whatever you want their main colour to be (I went with black) then paint the skin and metal, and you've got an army. They're not super high detail models and the big advantage of large model number armies is that you don't really see the details on an individual soldier anyway. In fact this works especially well with the guard as the uniform look and the fact that they are literally toy soldiers (who are traditionally single-colour) makes it much more acceptable to the eye than something like the Nids.

Orks have lots of details and you're painting a ton of models I agree that fun makes them relatively painless, but it should be noted you'll be taking a whole lot longer with Orks than with a lot of armies

Lol, your description of space marines was spot on. I’ve been painting red, black, and orange highlights for 6 months for my 2000 pts Blood Angels. 😅

The last 100~ odd seconds were absolutely brilliant! Thank guys! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣👍🏻🎅👍🏻

i have no ideia how i got here, but a loved your video, regards from brazil

Watched this episode while painting a combat patrol of kitbashed valhallans, i highly agree with the guard analysis

This list is accurate. I put a partially-started white paint-brushed 2000pts T'au army into shoeboxes and then bought and painted 2000pts of Necrons. When I was young I did 500 of Dark Eldar and 1000 of Orks, your assessment nailed everything.

Gotta love listening to this while painting up my genestealers, who arw my first and favourite army

I'm about to jump into painting a T'au army, and now I'm really looking forward to that airbrushing episode you guys were/are planning! If it's out already, is there anywhere I can listen to it?